Home Heating Monitor

We have "hot water" heating in our house - a central oil-fired boiler that pushes super-hot water to a manifold from which small pumps circulate the water thru the various "zones" in the house. Each zone has a thermostat that controls the pump.

Something that I've always wanted to know is the "duty cycle" of all the zones. This is even more relevant now that heating oil prices have doubled over the past couple years. This winter, if I can know the exact activity of all the zones, perhaps we can reduce our oil usage and save a few bucks.

Sounds like a fun electronics project!

The trick, of course, is capturing and storing the pumps' on/off times then storing and formatting the data into an understandable format.

Rabbit does all measuring via long wire runs to the heat-control relays.

Stored readings in onboard memory.

Rabbit is connected to the house's ethernet.

Data was retrieved by a Windows app via UDP.

This project failed, largely because the Rabbit is a piece of junk that I could never get working properly. Though it's programmed in the "C" language, Rabbit's flavor of C is very nonstandard, so I found it very frustrating to program the device. Additionally, I found the Rabbit's ethernet interface to be flaky... sometimes it simply wouldn't detect the network.